Sunday, 29 January 2017

To understand what this means, here's a narrative of Trump's insurgency. It explains what he is doing and what he is likely to do. It starts with the rise of neoliberalism.

This scene captures the moment (from Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas)

The rise of Neoliberalism

Neoliberalism is an ideology of extreme free market capitalism that was popularized by Thatcher, Reagan, and Pinochet. By the end of the cold war in the 90's, it became the default economic ideology of the United States when both the Republicans and the Democrats adopted it. Neoliberalism improved the world. Unfettered access to US markets (the most valuable in the world) led to twenty plus years of rapid economic globalization that lifted billions of people out of poverty and made many countries rich. However, neoliberalism came at a cost to the US. Worse, it destroyed the only engine of prosperity and political stability in the US, the US middle class. It did this through:

Asymmetric competition. The US was, and still is, the only major nation in the world to fully embrace neoliberalism. Every other country or economic bloc, from China to the EU, has barriers in place to rig the market to create or protect good jobs at home (think: Germany, China, South Korea, Japan...). These barriers work and incomes in these countries has zoomed while US incomes stagnated.

The Neoliberal Trade (jobs out, wealth in). For decades, the US traded millions of good jobs in manufacturing and services for tens of thousands of amazing jobs on Wall Street (NY) and Silicon Valley (CA). This inflow of wealth at the topline created a sense of prosperity even though the median income and the quality of life of the middle class collapsed.

Non-cooperative elites. It didn't take long before the power and the wealth of the elites benefiting from unfettered globalization became immense. In fact, these US neoliberal elites became so powerful, they were able to completely opt out of the US system of taxation -- none of the elites, from Apple to Google to Wall Street banks/funds to the wealthiest American citizens pay taxes. With most of the wealth generated by the US immune to taxation, the US government quickly became a bankruptcy in progress ($20 trillion in debt and growing fast). Worse, this perpetual fiscal crisis eliminated any chance that government services (like in health care, retirement, etc. proposed by Bernie Sanders) could be formulated to cushion the damage done by neoliberal economics.

The Neoliberal Market State

The effects of neoliberalism put US political elites in a bind. Neoliberalism made it impossible for the US, as it had for two centuries, to grow the middle class economically anymore. The US economy didn't provide good jobs to the middle class anymore due to the neoliberal trade and it didn't have the funds to cushion the loss of income with services due to the tax avoidance of non-cooperative US elites. So, it decided to double down on neoliberal ideology by applying it to US cultural identity. Cultural neoliberalism now became the primary political good of the state. By making this shift it became what my friend Philip Bobbitt predicted in his epic 2002 book, The Shield of Achilles: a market state. A market state, in contrast to the nation-state's focus on broad economic prosperity and cultural integration, focuses on providing opportunity to the individual. Although Bobbitt couldn't articulate it fully at the time (none of us could), the US market state provided opportunity to individuals through:

Open borders. Low barriers immigration. H-1B visas and green cards galore. Citizen of the world. Work and live anywhere. Borders controls should be lax. Extreme version: sanctuary cities, illegal immigrants become undocumented immigrants

As we now know, the rise of the neoliberal market-state didn't actually solve the internal contradiction of the neoliberal economics -- that barrier free trade allows a few people to take everything at the expense of everyone else. Like its economic cousin, cultural neoliberalism only benefited a minority of Americans (particularly those already benefiting from economic neoliberalism in NY and CA) while offering nothing but increasingly acrimonious identity politics to the majority. All of this might have continued indefinitely, but for the financial crisis of 2008. That crisis set in motion a deep unrest within the majority. An unrest that powers Trump's socially networked insurgency. An insurgency that is now actively dismantling the neoliberal market state through the following:

Reversing economic neoliberalism by actively support job creation domestically like all other countries (from China to Germany). More mercantilist. Success measured in good jobs created instead of extreme wealth accrued. Trump to workers: "I'm fighting for you"

Reversing cultural neoliberalism by building strong borders, controlling immigration, and demanding integration with traditional culture. Provoking identity politics to create confusion. Trump tells his insurgency: you are "the best"

Finally, and most importantly to me, Trump isn't dismantling neoliberalism to return to the old nation-state. He's building, with the help of social networking, a new model of governance for the US. One that operates more like Russia and China does (a reactive authoritarianism).

Thursday, 26 January 2017

A simple to change to how propaganda is developed and distributed has fundamentally altered US politics.

For our purposes, propaganda is the systematic use of...

biased,

false, and/or

misleading

...information to influence the decision making of a target audience.

What makes propaganda different than getting conned by a used car salesman is that propaganda is systematic -- i.g. it uses the media to influence groups of people. Even though we don't want to admit it, propaganda is the essence of political (as well as economic) competition, from the local election to superpower conflict during the cold war. Propaganda (from commercial brands to political ideologies) is everywhere and we soak in it every day.

Until recently, propaganda has been limited to governments (and corporations in the commercial realm) because it was expensive and difficult to do, particularly at a scale that influenced national political discourse. As of this last election, it's clear that era is over.

The social networking I helped get going back in 2001 now makes it possible for nearly anyone to conduct a propaganda campaign, and that change is blowing up our political system (to good or ill), fast...

Here's what changed. Political propaganda is shaped by the medium of media it is dependent on. Up until recently, that medium has been broadcast media. This created the following dynamic:

The high cost of broadcast media (raise the most money and you usually win)

reduces the number of participants (two major parties with tens of thousands working in their hierarchies)

repeating fewer messages ("It's the economy stupid").

On the positive side, the broadcast dynamic forces broad coalitions and consensus. On the negative, it produces stasis and stagnation. We had both until this election. In this last political season, broadcast propaganda was rapidly replaced by socially networked propaganda. A replacement that was accelerated by a presidential candidate who by natural inclination was drawn to it. Socially networked propaganda has a radically different dynamic:

Lower costs (nearly zero)

makes it possible for a huge number of participants (millions, in sprawling networks)

producing, adding to, and sharing a huge variety of political messages (supporting and attacking from every angle).

As you can see, the negative side of this dynamic is that it splinters and fragments consensus by enabling lots of different narratives. The positive side is that it is extremely responsive and innovative.

So what does the shift from broadcast to socially networked propaganda mean? How will it change our politics? It suggests that traditional political discourse is over since reasoned political debate and decision making is now impossible in this environment. It also means that until we find a way to harness this new medium, a new political dynamic will dominate. A dynamic characterised by cacophony:

All political discourse is at risk of becoming a cacophony of networked propaganda (see my article on the Russell Conjugation to see how facts are turned into propaganda).

Some political leaders learn how to create a cacophony on demand (Trump) by enticing the production of networked propaganda.

Over time, non-cooperative networked groups/tribes produce so much propaganda, the cacophony becomes perpetual.

Sincerely,

John Robb

PS: The Washington Post picked up my article on Trump's inversion of US foreign policy. Worth a read. PPS: China isn't going to benefit from the US withdrawal from TPP. Why? It's an aggressive exporter and most of the other nations in TPP are (or want to be) too.

Tuesday, 24 January 2017

Not only that, it's running open loop in an extremely chaotic environment and that's bad news. While open loop systems are extremely stable under controlled conditions, they can be just the opposite in complex, rapidly changing or uncertain environments. In those environments they fail quickly or worse: they run amok.

What is open loop? Open loop is a concept from control theory, but anybody who has ever worked with machines is already familiar with it.

In a nutshell, an open loop system doesn't use a feedback loop to modify its performance, it simply runs at the level you set them at until you turn it off or it runs out of fuel. A closed loop system is just the opposite. It modifies its performance based on changing conditions.

For example, its the difference between a fire in your fireplace that burns until it's out of wood and a home heating system that turns on and off based on the temperature you set.

So how does this apply to something as big and complex as the US?

The US is a socioeconomic system. We built it. For the last hundred years it's been a closed system. That means it:

has levers and mechanisms for adjusting its performance.

can measure its effectiveness relative to achieved results.

can mitigate any damage or exploit opportunity when the environment or situation changes.

However, those levers and mechanisms have frayed over the last couple of decades:

The levers and mechanisms of control the US has available to manager our socio-economic system are too weak to do so anymore. From the Fed ZIRP to a chaotic media to porous borders to companies that avoid paying any taxes (Google, Apple, etc.).

There is no consensus over what constitutes success. Who should benefit and how should they benefit? Should we let the market dictate everything or allocate success based on identity or should we build a prosperous middle class?

We've blundered into failures with security (9/11 to Iraq to ISIS), domestic development (rustbelt and Katrina response) to economic progress (the non-response to the financial crisis that we still haven't recovered from nearly a decade later).

Now, there are forces at work in the US, driven by ubiquitous globalization and a rapid expansion in Internet social connectivity. More importantly, from Trump's disruptive governance to a women's protest that was 3x bigger than any protest in US history, these new forces have exceed the ability of the US institutions to respond.

Saturday, 21 January 2017

Trump's open source insurgency put him in the White House, will another open source insurgency remove him from it before the next election?

Potentially. Let's dive into this. Last fall I wrote about the potential for an anti-Trump insurgency in the US that looked very similar to the protest that kicked Mubarak out of office in Egypt.

Social media amplifies every incident, spreading the anger it evokes like contagion across the country. Just watch. This suggests that the next open source protest we are likely to see will form to force Donald Trump from the Presidency before the next election -- a Tahrir square moment in cities all across the US. A massive and diverse open source protest that has one simple goal: the immediate removal of Donald Trump from office.

Could this happen?

Yes. The massive, anti-Trump women's march swept every major US city makes it possible.

Of course, the people who went to this march don't agree on all of the issues. In fact, I'm not sure they agreed on most issues. They did, however, all agree on one simple thing: Trump shouldn't be President.

This agreement and huge size of the protest is what I call the plausible promise of an open source protest. It demonstrates, to many of the people attending the protest and many on the sidelines, that removing Trump from office through protest may actually be possible.

This is a big deal, a plausible promise makes the likelihood of an effort forming to remove Trump from office through aggressive protest, much more likely.

It's also a big deal because open source protests are nearly unstoppable. Once a protest like this gets going here, it won't stop until it drives Trump out of office, just like it ousted the leaders of Egypt, Tunisia, Syria, and Libya.

Thursday, 19 January 2017

With Trump's inauguration tomorrow, I thought this thinking might be useful.

____

I was on a panel at the always insightful Suits and Spooks conference in Washington DC last week (it's an eclectic mix of IC pros and cybersecurity execs from around the world). It was lots of fun. The topic of discussion on my panel was the title of this post: will the world be safer or more dangerous under a Trump presidency?

One of my answers was a simple, synthetic (as opposed to analytic) framework for understanding Trump's foreign policy:

Since WW2, US foreign policy has been completely dominated by national security policy. In fact, it's hard to imagine a US policy that doesn't view the world through a militaristic, cold war lens. This means that ALL other aspects of foreign policy are conducted in support of (slaved to) national security policy. In particular, US trade policy is configured to promote the economic growth of allied nations (originally to fight the cold war) even if this trade relationships damages US economic performance.

Trump inverts that policy relationship. In Trump's post cold war world, US foreign policy will be dominated by trade policy. Even national security policy will be subservient to trade policy. If trade policy is dominant, we'll see China, Mexico and the EU (Germany) become competitors. Russia, in contrast will become an ally since it doesn't pose a trade threat.

National security under this regime will be used to reinforce and grow positive trade relationships. For example, military tension with China creates the opportunity for sanctions that simulate the function of tariffs (allowing the US to circumvent trade organizations and domestic resistance to tariffs). In a national security policy slaved to trade, any and all security guarantees extended to other nations will require a positive trade arrangement with the US. The US simply won't protect or extend security guarantees to any nation that has a non-beneficial economic relationship with the US (i.e. runs a trade deficit).

This may or may not be useful to you.

I find it useful since it has proven to be fairly good at predicting where Trump and his bros are careening towards next.

Sincerely,

John Robb

PS: Synthesis works better than analysis in complex, rapidly changing environments like this.

Wednesday, 18 January 2017

During the 2012 US Presidential election, the Romney campaign was accused of buying fake Twitter followers from a bot network after he gained a whopping ~150,000 new followers in one day. Romney's following jumped 17% in one day, providing him with a significant bump in the general perception of his grassroots popularity and support for a paltry ~$2,700 ($18 per thousand followers).

Despite the accusation, the astroturfing effort worked. Few saw, read, or cared the report that claimed these followers were bots and not people. Since 2012, there's been a significant increase in the use of political bots in nearly every country in the world, from Afghanistan to Venezuela. Most of these early efforts, usually done in support of the government or establishment, fall into the following categories:

Support padding (like Romney)

Disseminating or amplifying propaganda (Saudi Arabia does lots of this)

Most of these early political bots are used in large swarms. Swarms that allow them to act as a single unit to overwhelm the opponent with mass. In some cases, the swarm is used to repeat a message again and again to increase its influence (retweeting, reposting, etc. en masse). In others, it's used to flood an opponent with a large volume of responses refuting their claims.

To really get a sense of this, let's look at a single Russian swarm (out of many) that was used to pump kompromat and demobilize the opposition inside Russia. Botnet swarms like this flood any negative post, story, or tweet on a particular topic with pushback and amplify the dissemination of kompromat across social networks.

After the shooting of Boris Nemtsov in 2015, this botnet sprang into action claiming that the Ukrainians shot him:

By using the breadcrumb trail of identical posts, Lawrence Alexander used social networking analysis tools to map out the swarm. The result was a tightly interconnected network of 2,900 bots acting in concert to demobilize opposition and promote kompromat.

Big, crude swarms like this are already losing effectiveness as the social networking companies get smarter about detecting and banning them. Naturally, this has created an arms race between bot makers and the social networking companies, but with a twist.

The twist is that most governments aren't on the side of the social networking companies. Most are working on bot networks that circumvent controls in order to influence and control political opinion just like everyone else.

Sincerely,

John Robb

PS> Bots come in two flavors:

software or

a combination of software and hardware (robots).

While hardware based bots like drones have some scary/amazing (yet largely unexplored) tactical utility, most of the real action is in software bots or more specifically, social bots. Social bots can be run from a single computer using multiple social networking accounts. Others are operate as a network, using PCs compromised by malware. In general, social bots can do the following:

automate and amplify interaction with social networks.

can converse with people (chatbots, customer service bots, etc.) -- some of these are getting amazing.

actively and remorselessly troll, harass, and confuse opponents.

Obviously, all of these attributes make social bots extremely useful politically.

Tuesday, 17 January 2017

Russia has two exports: energy and kompromat. Since energy isn't nearly as valuable as it was a decade ago, Putin has increased Russia's production of kompromat to compensate. So far, he's been fairly successful with this, but for an unexpected reason.

What is kompromat? Kompromat is any material that can be used to discredit, mislead, blackmail, coerce, or confuse a targeted person or entity. This material spans the gamut, from a leaked sex video to a financial document proving corruption. In short, any material can be used as long as it is effective at damaging an opponent.

However, kompromat proved to be something more than simply as a way to deal with the occasional political enemy. Over time, it became clear that in a networked Russia, a steady flow of targeted kompromat was actually capable of keeping the nation's entire social fabric in a perpetual state of turmoil. A turmoil that enabled Putin to remain in power with much less authoritarian repression than would have been needed before Internet networking.

Of course, Russia isn't alone in its addiction to a steady diet of kompromat, deception, and fake narratives. Endless socioeconomic stagnation has led the US and the EU to developed similar addictions. Addictions that erupted in full force over the past year with an amazing ferocity.

The intentional disruption of social networks is now part of the political mainstream in the US (and increasingly the EU), and it took only one election cycle for the entirety of the political spectrum to adopt it. Now, salvos of intentional disruption are the most common form of political discourse in the increasingly fractured west.

Every participant in our political system is doing it. In fact, there is so much domestically produced and self inflicted social disruption going on now, by so many participants, Russia's attempts at US kompromat are below a rounding error in comparative effectiveness.

Given this backdrop of increasing disruption, I'm continually surprised that establishment organizations and figures are actively engaged in it to damage Trump. For example, the recent ongoing campaign by senior members of the intelligence community to use leaked kompromat to cast doubt on the Trump's legitimacy by tying him to Putin.

Disruption like this does more harm than good to the establishment. Trump is the incredible Hulk of disruption. The more you throw at him, the stronger he gets. In contrast, the establishment derives its power through the smooth functioning of the system and strong connections.

Anything that weakens, disrupts, negates, or damages the system makes it easier for Trump to operate and harder for the establishment to do the same.

Monday, 16 January 2017

There's a war for the future being waged online. It's being fought across the world's online social networks, and the outcomes of these online battles increasingly dictate the outcome of what happens later in the real world.

One of the most successful tactics used in this war is the manipulation of language in order to confuse, scare, nullify or outrage targeted audiences with the objective of making money, aggregating political power, and disrupting opponents.

While this manipulation has ALWAYs been true of human conflict, it's being done on a scale and to a degree that we've never seen before due social networking, globalization, and social/media fragmentation.

The Russell conjugation exploits the gap in the emotional content of a word or phrase and the factual content. Here are a few of Russell's examples:

"I am firm; you are obstinate; he is a pig-headed fool."

"I am righteously indignant; you are annoyed; he is making a fuss over nothing."

Notice how the factual content remains unchanged. In each case, the person referenced is factually described as "a person who is reluctant to accept new information." However, the words used change the emotional content drastically, from a positive to neutral-negative to negative-opprobrium.

The ability to change the emotional spin on a fact is critical. As all great marketing pros already know, the emotional content of a message is much more important than the factual content when it comes to selling anything. All brands are simply emotion (a commercial brand is monetized emotion).

However, this gets more complicated when an emotional spin is applied to facts presented as news. As Weinstein correctly points out, people don't just care about the factual content since they don't view a fact as a bit of disconnected information. They see all facts within a social context and that context is identified by the emotional context attached to that fact.

In fact, if historical behavior is a guide, people care more about the social consequences of the facts than the fact itself.

We've seen this before. Context seeking is also the basis of consumerism as Thorstein Veblen pointed out in his classic book on modern economics The Theory of the Leisure Class. Simply, the entire modern economy is based on people buying products and services in an attempt to mimic the choices and habits of people they consider cooler, wealthier or more successful than they are.

This is also true with news in a fragmented society. Most people go to news sources they trust to find out more than the facts. They want to find out how they should feel about a fact (or whether they should reject that fact) from people they consider to be leaders of their social network.

This context seeking used to be limited to the news presented by reporters/editors of the big papers like the New York Times and the TV network news organizations like CBS. That's not true anymore. Control over the emotional content of news has fragmented due to the rise of social media and social networking. People don't just look for the "correct" emotional spin on a fact from a big media company, they seek it from alt news orgs and personalities on social networks they identify with.

This suggests that the current debate over "fake news" isn't due to the use of fabricated information. Instead, it's really a negative way of describing news that has an emotional context that is at odds/war with the emotions approved by the major media, academia, or government.

Sincerely,

John Robb

PS: Here's a good book from Frank Luntz on how this manipulation works in practice. Example: how the Estate Tax was redeemed by calling it the Death Tax and Illegal Immigrants were redeemed by calling them Undocumented Immigrants.

On Brave New War

G. Gordon Liddy Show (radio)...this is a seminal book in the truest sense of the term.. way ahead of the curve... go out and buy it right now -- G. Gordon Liddy

City JournalRobb has written an important book that every policymaker should read -- Glenn Reynolds (Instapundit)

Small Wars JournalWithout reservation Brave New War is for professional students of irregular warfare and for any citizen who wants to understand emerging trends and the dark potential of 4GW -- Frank Hoffman

Scripps Howard News ServiceA brilliant new book published by terrorism expert John Robb, titled "Brave New War," hit stores last month with virtually no fanfare. It deserves both significant attention and vigorous debate... - Thomas P.M. Barnett

Chet Richards DNIJohn has produced an important book that should help jar the United States and other legacy states out of their Cold War mindset. You can read it in a couple of hours – so you should read it twice...

Washington Times / UPIRobb correctly finds the antidote to 4GW not in Soviet-style state structures such as the Department of Homeland Security, but in decentralization -- William Lind (the father of 4th generation warfare).

Robert PatersonHaving painted a crystal clear picture of how a war of networks is playing out, he comes to an astonishing conclusion that I hope he fills out in his next book.

The Daily DishJohn Robb of Global Guerrillas has written the most important book of the year, Brave New War. - Daily Dish (The Atlantic)

Simulated LaughterWell-written. Brave New War reads more like an action novel than a ponderous policy book. - Adam Elkus

FutureJackedGo buy a copy of this book. Now. If you are low on cash, skip a few lunches and save up the cash. It is worth it. - Michael Flagg

ZenPunditThe second audience is composed of everyone else. Brave New War is simply going to blow them away. - Mark Safranski

Haft of the SpearThere aren’t a lot of books that make me recall a 12-year-old self aching for the next issue of The Invincible Iron Man to hit the shelves. Well done.
- Michael Tanji

Ed ConeHis book posits an Army of Davids -- with the traditional nation state in the role of Goliath. - Ed Cone (Ziff Davis)

Shloky.comThis is the first real text on next generation warfare designed for the general population and it sets the bar high for following acts. It is smart, it is a short read, and it will change your thinking. - Shlok Vaidya

Politics in the ZerosI suggest this is something Lefties need to start thinking about now, as that decentralized world is coming. - Bob Morris